Machine Dreams 5 - 8 June
Cracked Codes

Oren Ambarchi’s forceful hymn to the power and intensity of the rock machine, Dave Tompkins’ love letter to the vocoder and Maia Urstad’s elegy for FM noise.

Oren AmbarchiKnots
The Australian guitarist presents the live version of Knots, the centrepiece of his 2012 album Audience Of One (Touch). Ambarchi has worked with everyone from Fennesz, Charlemagne Palestine, Thomas Brinkmann, Phill Niblock, Jim O’Rourke, Keiji Haino, SunnO))) and more. Knots is a forceful hymn to the power and intensity of the rock machine.

Dave TompkinsHow to Wreck a Nice Beach
In his book How To Wreck a Nice Beach (2011), American writer Dave Tompkins traces the amazing history of the vocoder, from its invention as a speech recognition device at Bell Labs in 1928 to its use in Nazi research labs and Stalin’s gulags, right up to its more recent incarnation as a voice-modulating effects box.

Maia UrstadCrackle Stories
As standard radio technology moves from analogue to DAB, a whole world of sound will be lost: the strange yet familiar tuning noise found in the gaps between stations. Sound artist Maia Urstad’s performance is a wireless composition in which she makes a live mix of voices and interference noise from radios around the world and sends it to portable radios held by members of the audience. An elegy for a vanishing region of the sound spectrum.